


Little Miles (Join You in the Sun)

by RaymondShaw



Category: Man of Steel (2013)
Genre: 'Planet' bullpen members also make a brief cameo, Canon-Compliant, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Self-Reflection, minor mention of Jonathan & Martha Kent, minor mention of Jor-El & Lara Lor-Van, post-movie timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:42:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25980793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaymondShaw/pseuds/RaymondShaw
Summary: “The symbol of the House of El means hope. Embodied within that hope is the fundamental belief in the potential of every person to be a force for good.”- Jor-El, from ‘Man of Steel’, 2013In the downtime well after the dust of Metropolis has settled, the last son of Krypton (Kal-El, alias Clark Kent, alias Superman) reflects.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Lois Lane
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	Little Miles (Join You in the Sun)

****

**Wanna write one for you**

**The unwritable girl**

**Who sleeps in my hand**

**In this interstate world**

**Who leaves me for dead**

**In my ghost town grey**

**And returns like color TV**

**And I’ve tried to run**

**My little miles**

**Stumble over my sin**

**You’ll never find me out**

**It’s been just one dream**

**We’re living in**

**But you’re still, and you’re bright, and you’re quiet**

**In the heart of it**

**[Gregory Alan Isakov, “Unwritable Girl” from the album ‘That Sea, The Gambler’, 2007]**

Insecurities.

It’s funny how suddenly – how _easily_ – they can crop up in everyday casual conversation.

Take football, for example.

It being a Friday night, the second-stringers of the Daily Planet news crew have opted to abandon Perry (that’s Mr. White, our eminent editor, to you, Smallville) and the bull-pen for the relaxing and…stimulating…atmosphere of the local pub.

Oh – and thanks to the persuasive insistence of Steve Lombard (who seems to have extended Perry’s directive of ‘show the greenhorn the ropes’ to outside the office), one Clark Kent is among their ranks.

The flatscreen above the bar competes with the hubbub of uninhibited camaraderie, the Rams scoring yet another touchdown with the latest run set up by their star quarterback Joe Pendleton*.

He takes another sip of beer, unable to bite back a grimace: it’s city-brew, weak and watery. Not like the kind his father favored: rich, with that nutty, bitter aftertaste he himself had (finally) come to love. His wrinkled nose doesn’t fail to attract the notice of his companions – who kid him good-naturedly when, in keeping with his alter ego’s bumbling persona, he attempts to brush it off as a natural consequence of the drink being ‘too strong for a country boy’.

And he’s just leaning back in his seat, soaking in the sight of Lois Lane (the paper’s resident Pulitzer-winner) with her hair down – the thick strands falling down in a red-gold curtain around her shoulders, her face alight with an impish glee born of the cheer of a rare evening out with friends (work friends, but, still) – when a roar of appreciation and a piercing whistle of admiration (Steve’s, no doubt) sound directly in his left ear. It’s times like this when he rues how much more sensitive his hearing is as compared to the average human’s. _“Touchdown!”_

He smiles and claps along with the rest, stifling a perfunctory grin at the enthusiastic whoops and hollers as his mind skips back through the years. “Yeah! All right!”

* * *

He won’t tell her how much he fears his own strength.

He can’t tell her how many baby forks – spoons, cups, bowls, toys – met their untimely destruction at his clumsy, untrained infant’s hands.

He’ll spare her the constant terror of his childhood – how a playful shove or an over-enthusiastic high five could have led to broken bones or worse. How sports became a farcical pretense. She’s always known he was considered the bookish type, but he prays she’ll never parse out the reason why.

He won’t tell her how painfully restrained intimacy among his family became, for a time, as he grew into his burgeoning powers. How his mother and father (though only foster parents, they deserve no less than these honorifics in his mind) invaded his nightmares – an eager hug turned to gory horror as his encircling arms crushed their brittle ribs into so much matchwood (to this day the sound of a twig cracking underfoot still makes him flinch), their faces turning lurid purple as they gasped for air, the viscous red blood spurting from their shattered mouths, their wild eyes rolled over white as they slumped lifeless to the kitchen floor like broken dolls…

The hands that pulled a swarming school bus from a river have snapped a man’s neck. An evil man, true – but still a living, breathing soul.

The fingers that scrounged an extraterrestrial sentry bot into scrap-metal could just as easily smash her skull.

He’ll never tell her how afraid he is that his powers – mighty as they are – may not always be enough. That there are and will be circumstances outside what even his abilities can rectify.

That’s why he’ll never tell her about the time he and his father (Jonathan Kent) were trying to remove a stubborn monster of a stump from a virgin planting field. They’d fought it every way they knew how, but neither man nor beast nor machine – nor even thirteen-year-old Clark’s formidable strength – could budge it more than a few inches. 

There are some wounds (that Alaskan night in the bowels of the Fortress of Solitude) too deep for cauterizing laser vision; some falls (that plunge from a death-spiraling escape pod) too far for supersped flight. Some forces of nature (that twister...oh, Dad, why, _why?_ ) packing more steel in their punch than the legendary Man Of…

And these are just the purely physical. There are things besides – nebulous but driving things like greed and power, fame and fortune, fear and uncertainty – which, in hands wielding sufficient influence, have the capacity to render him impotent and weak as effectively as any Kryptonite.

He hasn’t told her, as their relationship has matured and deepened, how the old recurring dreams have returned to haunt him now. That as he wakes in the small hours of the morning sweat-soaked and trembling, sucking in huge lungfuls of air while the tears are still wet upon his cheeks, he is conscious of a single major change – of her face, her terrified eyes glazed over in death, having replaced his parents’. And how the thought of hurting her makes him utterly nauseous and frightens him worse than anything else ever could.

But, he remembers, as the ghastly shimmering of the Phantom Zone and the collapsing Black Zero faded into mere memory, as she clung to him still though her feet were planted on firm ground and looked up at him with huge, trusting eyes, that urge to protect welling up so powerfully inside he was fit to burst. He couldn’t help but hold her as gently as if she were a newborn kitten. And as they kissed – shyly, tentatively, like the blooming of the first of the spring flowers – it was like an affirmation…

For if anyone knows of strength’s more mysterious manifestations, he surely does.

He has been told of the strength of the sacrifice two parents made who not only let their child go, but thrust him out on a journey across the vastness of cold, unforgiving interstellar space in the faintest of hopes for a kinder, gentler future.

He has flourished under the unselfish strength of a midwestern couple who raised a son not theirs by birth, but by love – a son with unexpected abilities and associated handicaps that may have been beyond their comprehension but not, it proved, their compassion.

He has been granted the strength of the trust of a city – a nation, a world – to one who hails, far from merely beyond their borders, beyond the moon and stars.

He has seen the strength of a besieged people’s indomitable fighting spirit in the pursuit of liberty and justice.

He has come to understand the strength of a priest’s faith in a universal God of _all_ creation.

And he has been gifted with the strength of one woman’s insatiable curiosity for the truth: the simple truth that a man’s identity – the depths of his dignity and the extent of his humanity – counts ‘planet of origin’ as of no consequence.

And so he allows himself the tiny green sprig of tender hope that maybe, just maybe, he needn’t worry quite so much that everything will turn out fine.

* * *

“Penny for your undoubtedly-licentious thoughts, Mr. Kent? Or is more than money required as sufficient incentive?”

...Caught.

He’s blushing now – and trying (i.e. failing miserably) to hide it – under her scrutiny. A disconcerting development, since it’s (apart from absolutely mortifying) rather more than mildly…inappropriate? no, incongruous – _there’s_ a word-of-the-day for a fledgling journalist! – given their official (meaning their public) strictly-professional rapport.

And he promptly states as much. For while the danger of discovery that dogs their every step may not at the moment be foremost in his mind, the cold, greasy trickle of anxiety stirred from its slumber in his gut by this omnipresent threat at least begins to bleed the fiery stain from his cheeks.

They really can’t afford to be taking chances like this. Though, of course, all risk is assumed by choice, salvaging a semblance of privacy and a chance at a ‘normal life’ is a cruel case of ‘needs must’. Their shopworn good luck is already spread too thin as it is – stretch it any further and it’s liable to start sprouting holes at the seams. And knowing that’s not just paranoia talking, either, makes for a sobering reality.

Of course, he should also know by now that her much-practiced powers of observation have been honed sharp as a hawk’s by experience, and so she doesn’t miss the fleeting glint of bleak steel that flashes for an instant in his gaze before winking out of existence in a carefully-crafted moue of embarrassed, trivial disappointment. 

But it’s beyond difficult to maintain the pretense of colleague/casual acquaintance/not-quite friend, as her cornflower eyes seek and capture his own as they slide casually over his face, piercing through his gaze to read the reason behind it – softening just a hint around the edges in sympathetic apology – and he can’t help but think that for all it’s he that has the X-ray super vision, Lois Lane surely has the power to see right through him every time.

Instantly he’s furious at himself, for dampening one of the few miserable scraps of moments and memories together fate has deigned fit to toss their way. Desperate to keep the mood light, he cracks,

“If only for the sake of propriety, Lois. I know you don’t stand too much on social graces, but…”

Naturally, the award-winning writer in her can’t resist a comment on his word choice. He makes a futile, abortive attempt to laugh it off before she throws him a positively predatory smirk and says,

“Didn’t think you’d know what ‘propriety’ means, Kansas.”

Deadpan, he looks her straight in the eye and fires back,

“Tell you the truth – I didn’t. I had to look it up.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, I was scouring my computer for old files and ran across two approximately five-year-old unfinished MofS drabbles. Rather than let them languish on my hard drive, I knocked them together and this was the result.
> 
> *I obviously know a sum total of zero about American football - so this is shamelessly ripped straight out of the 1978 fantasy-comedy film 'Heaven Can Wait', starring Warren Beatty.


End file.
